A Man's World. Edwards Albert
A letter came in due course giving me permission to accept an invitation to pass the summer with one of my schoolmates.
It was a wonderful vacation for me – my first taste of the sea. The boy's family had a cottage on the south shore of Long Island. The father who was a lawyer went often to the city. But the week ends he spent with us were treats. He played with us! He really enjoyed teaching me to swim and sail. I remember my pride when he would trust me with the main-sheet or the tiller. The mother also loved sailing. That she should enjoy playing with us was even a greater surprise to me than that my friend's father should. Whatever their winter religion was, they had none in the summer – unless being happy is a religion. I gathered some new ideals from that family for the home which Margot and I were to build.
In the spring-term of my second and last year in the school, we were given a course on the "Evidences of Christianity." It was a formal affair, administered by an old Congregationalist preacher from the village, whom we called "Holy Sam." He owed the nickname to his habit of pronouncing "psalm" to rhyme with "jam." He always opened the Sunday Vesper service by saying: "We will begin our worship with a holy sam." I think he took no more interest in the course than most of the boys did. It was assumed that we were all Christians and it was his rather thankless task to give us "reasonable grounds" for what we already believed.
It had the opposite effect on me. The book we used for a text was principally directed against atheists. I had never heard of an atheist before, it was a great idea to me that there were people who did not believe in God. I had not doubted His existence. I had hated Him. The faith and love I had given Mary and Oliver had turned to disgust and loathing. Their existence I could not doubt, and God was only the least of this trinity.
It would be an immense relief if I could get rid of my belief in God. The necessity of hate would be lifted from me. And so – with my eighteen-year-old intellect – I began to reason about Deity.
The pendulum of philosophy has swung a long way since I was a youth in school. To-day we are more interested in the subjective processes of devotion – what Tolstoi called the kingdom of God within us – than in definitions of an external, objective concept. The fine spun scholastic distinctions of the old denominational theologies are losing their interest. Almost all of us would with reverence agree with Rossetti:
To God at best, to Chance at worst,
Give thanks for good things last as first.
But windstrown blossom is that good
Whose apple is not gratitude.
Even if no prayer uplift thy face
Let the sweet right to render grace
As thy soul's cherished child be nurs'd.
The Father's generation held that a belief in God, as defined by the Westminster confession was more important than any amount of rendering grace. I thought I was at war with God. Of course I was only fighting against the Father's formal definition. Our text book, in replying to them, quoted the arguments of Thomas Paine. The logic employed against him was weak and unconvincing. It was wholly based on the Bible. This was manifestly begging the question for if God was a myth, the scriptures were fiction. Nowadays, the tirades of Paine hold for me no more than historic interest. The final appeal in matters of religion is not to pure reason. The sanction for "faith" escapes the formalism of logic. But at eighteen the "Appeal to Reason" seemed unanswerable to me.
I began to lose sleep. As the spring advanced, I found my room too small for my thoughts and I fell into the habit of slipping down the fire-escape and walking through the night. There was an old mill-race near the school and I used to pace up and down the dyke for hours. Just as with egg-stealing something pushed me into this and I worried very little about what would happen if I were found out.
After many nights of meditation I put my conclusions down on paper. I have kept the soiled and wrinkled sheet, written over in a scragly boyish hand, ever since. First of all there were the two propositions "There is a God," "There is no God." If there is a God, He might be either a personal Jehovah, such as the Father believed in, or an impersonal Deity like that of the theists. These were all the possibilities I could think of. And in regard to these propositions, I wrote the following:
"I cannot find any proof of a personal God. It would take strong evidence to make me believe in such a cruel being. How could an all-powerful God, who cared, leave His children in ignorance? There are many grown-up men who think they know what the Bible means. They have burned each other at the stake – Catholics and Protestants – they would kill each other still, if there were not laws against it. A personal God would not let his followers fight about his meaning. He would speak clearly. If he could and did not, he would be a scoundrel. I would hate such a God. But there are no good arguments for a personal God.
"An impersonal God would be no better than no God. He would not care about men. Such a God could not give us any law. Every person would have to find out for himself what was right.
"If there is no God, it is the same as if there was an impersonal God.
"Therefore man has no divine rule about what is good and bad. He must find out for himself. This experiment must be the aim of life – to find out what is good. I think that the best way to live would be so that the biggest number of people would be glad you did live."
Such was my credo at eighteen. It has changed very little. I do not believe – in many things. My philosophy is still negative. And life seems to me now, as it did then, an experiment in ethics.
My midnight walks by the mill-race were brought to an abrupt end. My speculations were interrupted by the doctor's heavy hand falling on my shoulder.
"What are you doing out of bed at this hour? Smoking?"
I was utterly confused, seeing no outlet but disgrace. My very fright saved me. I could not collect my wits to lie.
"Thinking about God," I said.
The doctor let out a long whistle and sat down beside me.
"Was that what gave you brain fever?"
"Yes."
"Well – tell me about it."
No good thing which has come to me since can compare with what the doctor did for me that night. For the first time in my life an adult talked with me seriously, let me talk. Grown-ups had talked to and at me without end. I had been told what I ought to believe. He was the first to ask me what I believed. It was perhaps the great love for him, which sprang up in my heart that night, which has made me in later life especially interested in such as he.
I began at the beginning, and when I got to "Salvation" Milton, he interrupted me.
"We're smashing rules so badly to-night, we might as well do more. I'm going to smoke. Want a cigar?"
I did not smoke in those days. But the offer of that cigar, his treating me like an adult and equal, gave me a new pride in life, gave me courage to go through with my story, to tell about Oliver and Mary, to tell him of my credo. He sat there smoking silently and heard me through.
"What do you think?" I asked at last, "Do you believe in God?"
"I don't know. I never happened to meet him in any laboratory. It sounds to me like a fairy story."
"Then you're an atheist," I said eagerly.
"No. A skeptic." And he explained the difference.
"How do you know what's good and what's bad?"
"I don't know," he replied. "I only know that some things are comfortable and some aren't. It is uncomfortable to have people think you are a liar, especially so when you happen to be telling the truth. It is uncomfortable to be caught stealing. But I know some thieves who are uncaught and who seem quite comfortable. Above all it's uncomfortable to know you are a failure."
His voice trailed off wearily. It was several minutes before he began again.
"I couldn't tell you what's right and what's wrong – even if I knew. You don't believe in God, why should you believe in me? If you don't believe the Bible you mustn't believe any book. No – that's not what I mean. A lot of the Bible is true. Some of it we don't believe, you and I. So